


trust, deceived

by CycloneRachel



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Betrayal, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Introspection, One Shot, Post-Season/Series 05 Finale, Season/Series 05 Spoilers, Supergirl (TV 2015) Season 5
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:07:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25370611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CycloneRachel/pseuds/CycloneRachel
Summary: Director Dox was dead.Or at least, former Director Dox- given that National City’s DEO facility had been destroyed, Lex could dispense with the formalities and call him what he really was.Querl Dox. Brainiac 5- his ex-colleague. The Coluan.The traitor.~Lex reflects on his partnership with Brainiac 5, and where things went wrong.
Relationships: Lex Luthor & Querl Dox
Comments: 11
Kudos: 9





	trust, deceived

**Author's Note:**

> surprise?
> 
> so I started writing this yesterday, for no reason at all, and ended up liking where it went so much that I just added onto it tonight and figured I might as well post it here.
> 
> (and I promise, I will work on Pay the Asking Price soon, and get the next chapter up also soon-ish)
> 
> also this is kind of a follow-up to the Lex and Brainy fic I wrote for the El MAYarah fest collection? (day 21, "Forget Them", if you want to look for it). And even though Lex is an asshole, and his POV reflects that, I hope this is good anyway!

Director Dox was dead.

Or at least, former Director Dox- given that National City’s DEO facility had been destroyed, Lex could dispense with the formalities and call him what he really was.

Querl Dox. Brainiac 5- his ex-colleague. The Coluan.

The traitor.

It was ironic, really. Just that morning, Lex had spoken with him, referring to Supergirl and her little friends as heroes who would happily sacrifice themselves to save the world, when faced with the element-bending gods that served the leader of Leviathan. And, in an earlier conversation, he’d even lumped Dox in with them, calling attention to his morality. He may have tried to disguise his true intentions with logic and steel himself with emotionlessness, but he was, and always had been, all gooey hero on the inside.

Which was, admittedly, annoying, and one reason why he was glad to be done with him for good. He could try and rebuild the DEO, or start over in a new facility with a new director, and any trace of Dox would be wiped from the records, as if he never existed.

(As was correct, in that time, given what exactly Dox was and when he had come from.)

(In fact, he already had a new director under consideration- perhaps he wouldn’t go against his word, and would remain loyal to him until the end)

And now, confirming how Lex had read him, the Coluan had chosen a sacrificial death. He’d disobeyed Lex’s orders once more, and decided to capture Rama Khan and the others before Supergirl and the rest of his friends died, and he hadn’t even tried to take the pin that would’ve protected him from the radiation on the Leviathan ship.

In an odd way, he was impressed- Dox felt such guilt over what he’d had to do, that he saw no other way to save his friends than to lay down his life for them and die in their place. He had, evidently, despised working with Lex so much that he saw death as his only escape from him.

(It was no matter. If he hadn’t chosen this path, and tried to steal from Lex, or joined the fight against Leviathan as Supergirl and her friends tried to fight them off, Lex would have killed him himself anyway.

He’d only altered the order of things, with a similar desired result.)

(And even then, he expected him to do better- if Dox was going to betray him, he at least could’ve been smarter with it. He could have chosen a less obvious plan; put in more effort to hide what he was trying to do and made sure his method of defeating Leviathan couldn’t be undone.

For Lex had seen what had gone on when the doppelgangers arrived in the DEO- saw one of them trying to release the world he had captured, and Dox’s eventual success in taking him in by letting him be with the rest of his world.

He knew all about the Brainiacs’ tendency to bottle cities and worlds, had seen it attempted.

He had noticed, when a bottle used for that purpose was missing from the DEO vault.

He had noticed Brainiac 5 becoming more stressed, putting emotions over logic in the fight against Leviathan, even though he had pushed away his friends. He had known all along where his true loyalties had lay.

He was only disappointed that Dox had waited so long, and for nothing in the end)

And Brainiac 5 had the audacity to claim he’d underestimated him. Here he was, sitting on the floor of the Leviathan ship- looking even more pathetic than he would’ve otherwise. Weak, vulnerable, minutes away from death already.

(Lex would know.)

(His image inducer wasn’t working inside the ship, so when Lex met him there, he was green- just like his ancestor had been.

He’d known, since Mercy hacked into the image inducers from L-Corp, that there was a Brainiac descendant in the present day, that he wore such a device and walked among the humans like he was one of them.

It didn’t take long, from then, to find out what his human face looked like, and that he was friends with Supergirl.

Back then, Lex hardly expected that he would later take over the DEO, and cooperate with both the Kryptonian and the Brainiac, relatives of two aliens he despised.

But the Crisis changed a lot of things, and one of them seemed to be the alignment of the Brainiac before him.

Even if, as was obvious at the moment, some things hadn’t changed at all)

He was _laughing_ at him, acting like he wasn’t aware of something that had been entirely obvious in the months since they’d started working together. He wanted this to be his moment of triumph, spending his final moments with the satisfaction that he had won, and Lex had lost.

It was true that he didn’t know the exact method Dox would use to turn against him, even if he had a good guess as to when. And he hadn’t anticipated that Dox would indeed choose to die for everyone he knew, who (as far as he was aware) didn’t even care about him anymore, and were certainly not his friends.

He could have saved him. If the Coluan hadn’t been a traitor, and had waited, he wouldn’t have had to leave Gamemnae’s side (when she seemed to be dying too) to find him.

He would’ve, after Supergirl and her friends were dead, given him the anti-radiation pin, before he would enter the ship and upload the mortality code, killing the gods and making sure that there was no way they would’ve been brought back.

They would be heroes, as intended, and though Dox would be heartbroken, there were ways such an emotional response could have been negated.

But like hell he was going to let Brainiac 5 know that, as he extracted the bottle housing the so-called gods, making sure his former colleague knew he had dug his own grave, and would lie in it alone.

Just like he had wanted to.


End file.
